Zero-Based Everything
“Life moves pretty fast.”
That’s something Ferris Bueller said, and it’s a famous quote because it’s true.
Reacting to all of this fast-moving change, slower-moving organizations and institutions tend to stack new rules, regulations, policies, and guidelines on top of old, creating what legal scholar Cass Sunstein famously called “sludge.” These are “excessive or unjustified frictions, such as paperwork burdens, that cost time or money; that may make life difficult to navigate; that may be frustrating, stigmatizing, or humiliating; and that might end up depriving people of access to important goods, opportunities, and services…[and] can have much more harmful effects than private and public institutions anticipate.”
Not too long ago I wrote about zero-based budgeting and zero-based structuring (ZBB and ZBS). ZBB is the idea that instead of assuming last year’s spending as gospel, you start over from zero and justify every incremental dollar. ZBS was my thought experiment about doing the same thing with org charts. What if nothing persisted and everyone was allocated to their highest and best use instead of their incumbent responsibility?
Now I’ve been thinking about zero-based everything.
Recently, after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs, he struck them back up under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. “What a relic,” The Wall Street Journal (which you know I read) opined. “A holdover from a bygone era.”
That caught my attention. A law written more than 50 years ago was relevant again simply because it never went away.
This isn’t a political point, but a structural one. Things persist not because they should, but because they do.
When I lived in Virginia, I had two political causes. One was privatized liquor stores. The other was term limits. Missouri does just fine on liquor distribution, so I’m down to one.
But maybe we wouldn’t need term limits if we had zero-based bureaucracy. Because “If this didn’t already exist, would we do it this way?” is an interesting question to ask about almost anything.
– Tim
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